Tiny Cat Warriors

Bart and Hobie

Bart and Hobie

Playing around some more with PainterX - this Bartok and Hobie sleeping in the sun rendered with chalk.

Bartok

Bartok

Playing around with new software - PainterX. This is Bartok rendered with colored pencil.

The Curse of the Kittens

Follow up - the Curse of the Kittens actually works.  The burglar who broke into our place was captured after a high speed chase in Daly City (about 50 miles away) on Friday night.  He'd broken into 2 other houses in our neighborhood on Friday morning, then apparently dumped some stuff off at a buddy's house (police are getting a warrant for that house) and a local pawnshop (sadly not our stuff).  He's an over-18 prior felon who's done time before for breaking & entering + drugs.  His connection to our town is that his pregnant girlfriend is living in a group home near downtown (make me extremely happy to know where my tax money is going). 

Anyway, back to the Curse of the Kittens - you take money from homeless kittens (i.e., the cash on my kitchen counter that was going into the Humane Society envelope that I keep) and God bends you over and sticks it right up your ass.  Apparently the bad guy in this case was apprehended after a high speed chase & he ended up badly injured after assaulting a police officer at the scene.  He was charged with 13 felonies related to the chase and the arrest, not counting the 3 felonies related to the 3 burglaries on Friday morning.  So, one of these 16 should be his 3rd strike, which means something even in California.  Do not fuck with the kittens.

Damn, damn, damn

We were headed up to Lopez Island in the San Juans yesterday, flying out of SFO early and stopping for lunch and an IT break in Seattle.  Almost to Anacortes to catch the ferry when our catsitter called to say the house had been burgled. All the cats are fine (although scared) & they demonstrated extraordinary common sense in not wandering out through the broken sliding glass door or one of the two broken windows. (The burglar apparently could not decide on a way to get in the house.  Complete fucking dumbass.)  We turned around immediately and caught the next available flight to the Bay area, which was unfortunately to Oakland, requiring a $110 cab ride to get back to where the car was parked at SFO.  We ended up getting home around 10:30 pm. 

Terry and Pam got the police on the scene, someone to board up the windows and an amazing clean up job of much broken glass.  With the police and various workman around the house, Bartok decided this was the time to pull his ninja kitty routine and disappear, throwing everyone for a curve.  He finally took off the cloak of invisibility and let Pam know where he was as we were driving from SFO home.

The good news: he left hand and fingerprints of remarkable clarity all over the house according to the police.  The next door neighbor noticed a young black guy wearing an oversized hooded sweatshirt walking up our driveway and getting into a beat up old Honda Accord at around 12:30 pm.  The police got a good description and some good leads - an Accord of that description was stolen hours earlier in our town.

The bad news: I'm certain that fixing the windows & sliding glass door will cost $2,500 or more.  The list so far as we know now of what got burgled: PM's MacBook, my iBook G4 laptop + extra battery, an XBox 360 + controllers + HDD player, one of those little portable DVD players for traveling, 2 iPod shuffles, all cords and remotes for the electronics, a Canon S400 pocket camera, a jar of change, 2 pillowcases.  I get a lot of surveys in the mail to take, the kind where they shame you into filling out the survey by including one or two brand new dollar bills.  I sometimes fill out the survey, more often throw it out, but always set the money aside in an envelope that I give to the humane society every year.  Any money I find in the street goes into that envelope (oddly I find that when I give the money away, I tend to find a lot more money in the street - I've picked up a couple of $20 and a $100 so far this year that were just laying on the sidewalk.  Anyway, it all goes to the humane society).  I had $3 on the kitchen counter from recent surveys that I hadn't take upstairs to put in the humane society envelope yet & the bastard took that $3.  If karma works like it's supposed to, he'll be in for a real get-pounded-in-the-ass karmic retribution for taking money that properly belonged to homeless kittens.

Today will be busy getting the locks re-keyed & continuing the clean up. PM will need to do something about a computer as the MacBook was her primary computer.  And I'll be spending some time thinking about how to harden Casa Tiny Cat Warrior more than it already was.  Our planned life in a few years on Lopez Island is looking better and better as an island with a population of about 2,000 sort of assures a pretty low level of property crime.  I thought of our little town here as pretty safe, but I'm looking at a business card right now from someone in the Gang Crimes unit of the local police department that has my case number written carefully in the upper right hand corner and I'm not feeling quite so safe.    

Efficient Markets?

Anyone who still believes in the Efficient Market Hypothesis hasn't been paying attention to the US stock market this week.